Splash Damage Explain Brink’s Backstory

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Giant cities in the sea, a crisis of resources, a refugee disaster, the brink of civil war (do you see…), yes it’s all going on in Brink, and Splash Damage have produced an enthusiastic new video to explain it all. Richard Ham, Paul Wedgwood, and Ed Stern explain the world they’ve created while we get to see more of the art, and more of the fancy shootin’. Interesting to see an FPS developer making this kind of effort, and certainly landing a few yards from the usual sci-fi template. Of course I’m rather more keen to actually see how this one plays, especially since it’s been a while since a multiplayer FPS really grabbed me. Maybe… just maybe.

62 Comments

They have some very interesting ideas, my ears are pricked. If you get to ask, find out about servers. Its a great filter question, I mean look at bioshock 2’s multi. As a natural selection fan bio2 is the perfect application of selfcustomisation (once you get a few levels) shame it plays like junk because of 1995 style lag caused by the lack of servers.

I don’t think you can compare Borderlands with Brink. It’s like comparing Starcraft 2 with Shogun 2. Yes, both share the same genre, both share the same capital letter and both can be played in multiplayer. But hell, they’re not comparable.

However, you can compare Brink with Quake Wars or TF2. The’re classes and sentries and heavies and etc.

cuz there’s classes, sentries, brick, not realistic characeter design(yes, there’s more of unrealistic to berderlands) and WTH do YOU know about borderlands? no fucking way was I comparing those 2, it wouldn’t be anything like comparing S/S: Velocity to Blur.

I must admit Brink is really growing on me, I don’t know what but initially I didn’t have a great deal of interest but over the past few months magazine previews and online trailers have made me more excited. Still going to wait for reviews etc though.

I actually really enjoyed Quake Wars despite some annoying vehicles. I never really got why it didn’t catch on (I’m thinking it mostly had to do with the orange box coming out at the same time). It took some getting used to at first, but it was decently fast paced, well balanced (except for the vehicles that were mostly just annoying) and had varied mission objectives. It makes me sad that it didn’t get its time in the spotlight.

I’m pretty excited for this game. The ET gameplay without the bloody vehicles introduced in QW, with the addition of parkour movement. It always bugged me that in most games you get stopped by small barriers one could easily jump or climb over. I want to see what kind of awesome acrobatic kills people pull off.
I always liked the campaign structure of ET, and I’m hoping Brink has similar gametypes (ooooh, branching campaigns).

Quake Wars had a number of problems, it was laggy and the hotboxes were especially wonky. It played more like a crappy battlefield clone with vehicles and large sprawling maps rather than the close quarters infantry combat of it’s predecessor. I don’t think the asymmetrical teams helped either. I really hope they decide to stick to small objective map campaigns without vehicles.

You guys are so simple. Women don’t fight in wars because women get raped when they get captured. See the difference? Men get killed, women get captured and gang raped for the rest of their miserable lives.

There is a reason women aren’t supposed to fight in wars, and it has nothing to do with upper body strength.

Yes Quake Wars was flawed but it had a lot of potential, the missions were varied and fun and asymmetrical gameplay gave a unique feel to it. I liked it.

Once, I got lucky enough to get on a server full of really good players who worked great together, on both teams. The experience I’ve had playing through the campaign with them was absolutely one of the best in my history as a gamer. That happened to me once, normally it was a competent shooter I liked, but that one time it was incredible.

i personnally loved quake wars and after awhile no one used the vehicles except quickly getting to places. But I have to say its one of the most fun experience that I have played. Better then TF2. Unfortunatly the limited amount of maps and the low population after awhile got it down for me. Hopefully brink can expand on this and give more maps.

As for that women comment that is extremly stupid and insensitive to both women and fecking men. men also get captured and sometimes tortured and sometimes raped so yeah. Also i have no idea why that matters to a fictional video game.

I’ve been upbraided in this space before for making the same comment abnout the same game but everyone has their hobby horse: The failure to include female avatars is nigh inexcusable in a modern game with customizable avatars.

It’s 2010, the percentage of gamers with two X chromosome is in the factors of 10 — over 40% by ESA figures. Wake up and smell the shifting demographics.

Yeah, I get why people are angry, but they aren’t a monster studio like IW, its difficult to have female models be of equal quality without certain costs, or to make sure they have the same hitboxes etc. How do you make a female heavy have the same outline as a male heavy? How do you deal with needing double the memory for voices, animations and everything else gender specific?

If its not a big deal in CoD, TF2 and BFBC2, why is it this game that gets singled out?

Those are the arguments that get trotted out, and they’re all rather false dillemmas, as you need not have double anything. Take one of the guys/guy classes, and make it a girl. The voice, outline, animations, etc specific to that archetype just are different, not additional.

And I’m not singling this game out. I’ve made the same comments re: other games, including the ones you’ve mentioned. It’s less stark in single-player, one-character games, but even there, honestly, it’s wearying. I’m not excited about being forced to play Guy Generico in any avatar-driven game (and kudos to titles like Saint’s Row 2, Mass Effect and others for liberating us from playing stubbly, close-shorn mongs).

But the failure to include girlguys in games where you can pick from a whole raft of guys (particularly tweakable guys) is pretty much bad.

Memory wise in terms of voices I can see your point but if there going to do customisation of voices (if, I don’t know if they are) then changing a couple of the options to female wouldn’t hurt, either way voice samples aren’t the biggest of your assets.

And again if providing character customisation avatars then dropping in a couple of female ones is hardly gonna break the budget and without them it’l be a sausage fest…

“If its not a big deal in CoD, TF2 and BFBC2, why is it this game that gets singled out?”
Because in those games you can’t customise your avatars – in Brink you can. Plus, TF2 is set in the ’50s (I think), and BC2 and CoD are set in the about-nows. You don’t get women fighting on the frontline in those time periods. In the grim darkness of the semi-far future, on the other hand, female soldiers are more likely (in my ‘umble opinion).

While I don’t generally think the exclusion of gender options in a given game with/without customisation is a crime against the women’s movement… I will say that I do find it a bit strange that they seem to have spent so much effort in pushing this alternate future within which Brink takes place and strangely forget that women might exist in this future too.

I tend to treat these things on a case-by-case basis.

I mean, someone tried to justify TF2’s exclusion of the fairer sex because it takes place during a time period that wouldn’t have women fighting in a war. I take issue with this point because TF2’s 50s is a very stylised and cartoonish i.e. fictional 1950s. It is established that it is only really very loosely based on that time period and I think that is enough to justify that they do whatever the hell they like with regards to whether they include female avatars or not. I’m sure the 50s didn’t have balaclava-wearing gents in suits with a bad French accent working as spies either.

To me, the importance of the ability to play as a female avatar should depend on the breadth and depth of the world within which they would exist. It would matter much more in a game like Mass Effect because it is important that the player finds that the world is believable enough to feel sufficiently compelled with the stories that are going on (to say nothing of it being a wRPG convention).

Even if the Heavy (or w/e Brink calls it) class were limited to male models only, the Light and Medium classes could certainly have female body types. It’s one thing to exclude female models from a war zone – already a questionable decision for any portrayal of the future… – and quite another to exclude females from this game’s gang warfare, guerrilla fighting, etc. that seems intended to represent involvement by a significant chunk of the population. This oversight is…well, it’s obviously intentional, but it’s downright weird.

@ StormTec:
Justify? No. Explain? Hopefully.
I wasn’t saying that the decision not to have females in TF2 was right, I was simply providing a possible reason why Valve didn’t include females. Plus it was easy to use that reason as it fitted with the other two games mentioned.

it’s just another factor of failure games get pretty much standard, like TPS having shitty animations for weapons(yes, GTA is the textbook sample), or inability co control AI if it ain’t literally single player like May Payne. It is also a matter of bad inertia from gaming past(sucks to say this about as new industry as games) where Lara was the feminist of gaming. and seems to attract immature behavior. Also caused by stupid stupid thing like “not shooting women”.

Yeah, I figured that. I just thought TF2 was a bit of a stretch to fit in with the “accurate depictions of an era” explanation because, well, point being that TF2 isn’t what I’d call an accurate depiction of a given era (while the other two games you mentioned do strive to be)…

I think principally the main problem with the lack of female characters is their absence undermines the entire premise of the game. If Brink was a game set in some deep space mining rig the lack of ladyfolk might be understandable, but this is a game that’s purporting to be about the last of humanity duking it out for survival their absence is kind of startling. Albeit I’m sure it was probably a design decision (save on work), one wonders whether there are overtones of Luc Bessons ‘The last battle’ (link to imdb.com) where in the women in the film are treated like prized objects by the alpha males locked away in shadowy seclusion.

Essentially I guess, aside from the novel new movement mechanic what is Brink giving us that doesn’t already exist elsewhere. Musclebound dudes duking it out in arenas…..

it’s satiric, nobody would age an ark in that few years, it’s supposed to be comic in appearance(obviously devs started to realise we can’t ever have realistic graphics whith generations prior to Direct X 11).

Women went out of the city to escape from the civil war.
What is better, less women and more men or less men and more women?
If women die during war, there’s a probability that the population will continously decrease over time.

I am usually not a fan of FPS but this is intriguing to me. Can’t wait to see how it continues to be developed. I have to agree that the exclusion of female characters is strange. For a game that wants to stretch the border on who is good and who is bad why are they avoiding the issue of gender in combat?

I have no idea what your post has to do with mc’s post, or this article. Plus, people only get captured if they surrender or flee. In that case, they get enslaved/ransomed, a fate bad for both men and women. And most leaders would actually PREFER a warrior who suffers a worse fate when captured, since that would make said warrior less willing to desert/surrender/flee.

Male and female are sexes, not genders. It’s a common mistake but gender either refers to nouns or socially constructed personalities. When you’re talking about what biological wibbly bits people have, you are talking about sex differences. Thank you and goodnight.

It looks awesome but the only problem I see in the game is that people are going to overuse Sliding and keep sliding everytime they go around a corner, that’s the only apparent flaw of the game, the rest is just awesome.